One of the main duties of the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court is to inspect the cars and determine which ones appear to have blown past the $500 spending limit. This process is known as the “BS Inspection,” for obvious reasons, and the judges take many factors into account when determining the level of “Cheatonium-235” we detect in a vehicle. Obsessively detailed documentation (showing receipts for parts bought and sold) can be a big help for a team under suspicion. Bribing the judges doesn’t hurt (although we always say a bribe won’t help if you really, truly need to make one), and bringing a British Leyland, Rootes Group, or PRV-powered entry helps most of all. When we decide that a team has taken some liberties with the definition of $500, we assign penalty laps to the team, resulting in the car starting the race with a certain number of negative laps on its total. This means that cheaty teams still get to race, but they start out with a handicap.

LeMons racing also has a claimer rule to keep out the most outrageous cheaters, which means that Chief Perp Jay Lamm has the option of buying any entry on the spot for $500. This rule has been exercised just two times in the 69-race history of the series. The first LeMons racer claimed was the Diplomatic Immunity Mercedes-Benz S600, a car so contaminated by its past (the previous owner was a Paraguayan diplomat arrested at the San Ysidro border crossing with vast quantities of cocaine in the car’s trunk) that it was essentially unregisterable. The team begged the Chief Perp to take this nightmarish cop-magnet white elephant off its hands via the claimer rule, and he obliged. Jay promptly gave the car to a friend who wanted to put the V-12 engine in a street rod.

Then the Pratt & Miller team showed up to the 2010 Detroit Bull Oil Grand Prix with a Camaro powered by this full-on circle-track Chevy V-8, as part of a strategy to distract us from its somewhat less rule-bendy Toyota Supra. The Chief Perp decided to claim this engine, in order to stuff it into his Alfa Romeo GTV. (He has yet to collect it, though, the 2000 miles separating P&M HQ from LeMons HQ presenting something of a hurdle.) The Perp is not eager to claim cars; as he puts it, “The last thing I need is more hooptie-ass cars in my driveway!”

The point of all this is that the LeMons Supreme Court won’t let a team take advantage of a perceived loophole to stomp all the legit 500-buck hoopties with a monster cheater. Our experiences with LeMons teams backed by Pratt & Miller (and Hennessey, and any number of Charlotte-based NASCAR shops) have taught us to enforce a “real-world” value equation on parts that the team found “just lying around the shop.” If your connections enable you to get, say, a full set of brand-new Bilsteins for free, we want you to assign a value equivalent to what some schmuck off the street would have paid for them. Likewise, if you run a business that lets you get your hands on decent cars for scrap value, we will value your car at the “crackhead on Craigslist” price.

What we really want, of course, is for everyone to show up with stuff like 1961 Studebaker Larks and 1981 Fiat Stradas. One of the first real tests of our extremely subjective BS Inspection policy came at the 2009 Gator-O-Rama in Texas, with this 2005 Mini Cooper S. One of the guys on the team runs an automotive import-export business and got this battered-but-fully-drivable car for an alleged $250. In honor of the Battle of Hastings, we gave the car 1066 penalty laps. That meant that the team still got to spend the weekend racing, but wasn’t going to humiliate the Saturn SC2 and MGB-GT teams. In cases such as this, a gigantic number of penalty laps is something of a badge of honor; a penalty of 20 laps would be a fatal blow to just about any car’s chances of taking the overall win, so it’s better to go out in a blaze of glory with a gigantic penalty number.

The problem with this system is that you get Blaze of Glory Penalty Lap Inflation; teams looking down the barrel of a big BS penalty tend to want to get the biggest one of all time. At last month’s Sears Pointless race, we were faced with a couple of the most improbable “$500 cars” we’ve ever seen: a 2004 Pontiac GTO and a 2006 Mazda RX-8. Huh?

The “Holden Mike Rank” GTO of Chim Chim Racing was pretty thrashed, but it was still a real GTO.

Were this car to be piloted by a team of top racers (a real possibility in the hotbed of racing madness that is Northern California), it could very well slaughter the schlubs in E30s and Neons and Miatas. Blaze of Glory time! We gave the car two billion BS laps, which would have taken approximately 1000 years to complete on the Infineon Raceway track (the winning car in that race tallied 281 laps).

As it turned out, the Holden Mike Rank GTO wasn’t so quick, running 10 to 15 seconds slower than the top teams.

The GTO’s traction control was very effective in the rain, however, and Chim Chim Racing was one of the only teams that didn’t make multiple visits to the Penalty Box over the course of the weekend due to off-course and spin infractions.

Because life isn’t fair, we gave the Fukushima Debris Mazda RX-8 a mere 500,000,000 penalty laps, in spite of the fact that we were pretty sure it would be much quicker than the GTO at Sears Point.

The team claimed that the car was washed to sea by the tsunami that struck Japan last year, and that it was found on the beach in San Francisco. We were skeptical. As it turned out, the RX-8 was indeed very fast, though still five seconds off the pace of the winning entry.

The teams that get pounded with immense BS lap totals end up getting a full weekend of racing (well, provided their cars don’t blow up), and the competition doesn’t need to worry about getting wiped out by deep-pocketed loophole-exploiters. The guys on the Chim Chim Racing and Fukushima Debris teams had a good sense of humor about all of this; it’s the pro-driver-stacked Neon team that gets hit with five BS laps for its undocumented exhaust header that tends to scream loudest at the LeMons Supreme Court.